[SR 5]In which I blatantly mine you for ideas

[Dogbert]

So, from what I've been able to gather, SR 5 is not some cyberpunk or even future noir game, but a sort of "GTA in the future" because stealing cars is the only profitable criminal activity. What else do I need to know regarding "what people thinks SR 5 is about" vs. "what SR 5 is actually about" rules-wise?

[OgreBattle]

Is being a luddite that's totally disconnected from the internet always superior to being wired and hackable?

[Laertes]

The setting is a lot more magipunk than cyberpunk, because spirits are used heavily within industry and infrastructure since they're better than technological solutions. Since magic is inherent to the individual and doesn't cost money to use* there's less social alienation and income inequality than there is in most cyberpunk, and more of a caste of superpeople running stuff.

Also, fucking dragons. Always fucking dragons, and when it isn't dragons it's immortal elves or some other supernatural handwaving bullshit. For a game supposedly about megacorporations, there is very little metaplot in which they actually act like megacorporations, because that's harder to write well than a metaplot in which "OMG A DRAGON DID IT."

Also, skilled people use better guns. Low-skill people use worse guns. Firearms, that one situation where it is sensible for a person to be able to buy their way to success, are instead all about finding the accuracy that's the right size for your dice pool.

Also, every technological item contains an Agent who will find out who you are and what you're doing and will fuck you up if told to. Walking through a street in a corporate area with availability F cyberware is basically the same as going up to a policeman and saying "please arrest me."

Also, did you know that the word "item" comes from the Latin phrase for "also", because people kept using it in the way that I've used it here and so it became common to speak of "a list of items."

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*Mostly.

[Stahlseele]

Rules-Wise SR5 is about the devs trying to limit the fuck huge dicepools they introduced in SR4 by making up an arbitrary limiting factor and actually simply calling it a limit. If you have a Dice-Pool of 20 and a Limit of 10, then on a really good roll, half of your dice mean nothing at all, because you are limited to 10 hits on 20 dice. If you don't use your edge stat to limit break obviously.

Also, the introduction of so called "online bonus" bullshit to make people WANT to be hackable so that Deckers(yes, they went back there) actually have something else to do in combat but the same thing most anybody else does. this being shooting guns. this is as bullshit as making commanding voice a thing for all face characters so they don't need to shoot guns in combat either but simply can tell the opposition to drop their weapon or to jump out of cover and lie down on the ground . .

Prices for stuff have gone THROUGH THE ROOF! And the run rewards are bullshit low, officially. If you do a Black Run against a Tripple AAA you can expect to get 10k per head. If you do NOT fight a vastly superior in both skill and number opposition. So, basically, a sneaky run (which is usually what you want to accomplish) will pay less than calling the target beforehand, demanding their best swat team to be at hand then going in guns blazing.

Trolls get fucked over even more so than they were in SR4.

[Username17]

I make no secret of holding Shadowrun 5 in the utmost contempt. But I should point out that both Laertes and Stahlseele are getting the effects of "Limits" wrong. That's understandable, because the actual developer attempted to explain how limits worked and what they did and why they were there, and it was obvious that he doesn't understand them either. The real effects of Limits, like the real effects of everything in that entire poorly designed book, are completely different from what they are supposed to do. Everything in Shadowrun 5 works in a way that it is not supposed to. Everything. No exceptions. That book is a fucking mess.

For example: Limits give you hit caps, which changes your odds of success on opposed rolls, but not on unopposed rolls. So you want a finely calibrated sniper rifle for CQC (because shooting an opponent in combat is an opposed roll), but a rusty machine pistol is completely adequate for rooftop sniping (because shooting an unaware but distant target in heavy cover is an unopposed roll with a lot of dicepool penalties).

Example2: Limits can be bought off at any time for one roll (after you roll) by spending an Edge. Edge is a limited metagame currency, so your limit is very important for tasks you have to succeed on over and over again, but totally meaningless on tasks you can retry on but only have to succeed at once.

The writers of this misbegotten edition of failure do not understand these effects, there's no reason to expect anyone else to.

-Username17

[pragma]

SR5 is so bad it made me drop Shadowrun after having a blast with SR3 and 4. (By the way, does anyone know of games that handle espionage as well. Possibly under the FUDGE/FATE system; that RNG and skill combination seems quite mechanically sound at first glance.)

The game suggests that enchanting is useful by allowing you to make one shot spell-storage items. These are not uniformly useless, but they're pretty close. And the weight of the rules for them (and building foci) almost caused the rules chapter to implode.

Another favorite is that the armor and damage values have been jacked up so high that the body stat doesn't really matter. I actually like the feel of the DPS they have in combat -- it scares my players at times their properly built SR4 characters would have scoffed -- but they achieved it by making body very extraneous to the game.

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, one of the ways Trolls got nerfed into uselessness.